Policy-making is one of the most consequential activities any government or institution undertakes. Yet the tools and processes behind it haven’t changed in decades. We built Maata to change that.
Every law, regulation, and institutional framework starts the same way: someone opens a Word document, drafts something, and sends it around for comments.
What happens next is where things fall apart.
Feedback arrives in email threads, WhatsApp messages, scanned PDFs, and meeting minutes that no one transcribes. A Permanent Secretary asks “did we incorporate the Chamber of Commerce’s input?” and three people spend a week trying to find out. A legal drafter discovers that the version they’ve been working on for two weeks isn’t the latest one. A Minister approves a policy and six months later, no one can tell you whether it’s been implemented.
This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a process problem that technology has ignored.
Governments spend $80,000 to $150,000 per policy and wait 6 to 12 months for an average cycle — not because the work is inherently slow, but because the process is fragmented, opaque, and manual at every step.
Here’s something most platforms get wrong: they treat all policy work as the same. It’s not.
When we sat down with policy practitioners — ministers, permanent secretaries, legal drafters, compliance directors, line managers — a clear pattern emerged. Policy operates in two distinct worlds, and the people working in each have fundamentally different needs.
Most tools treat these as the same workflow. Maata doesn’t. The platform is designed from the ground up to support both worlds — with the right workflows, the right access controls, and the right language for each.
Policy isn’t made by a single person. It moves through a chain of people, each with distinct authority, responsibilities, and frustrations.
We identified seven core personae across both policy domains. Every feature in Maata is built to serve at least one of them.
They can’t see the full picture. Stakeholder input is fragmented. Politically sensitive feedback is hard to track. Once a policy is approved, there’s no line of sight to whether it’s actually being implemented.
High-level drafting with version control, a clear audit trail of every consultation and decision, and dashboards that show policy progress from inception to implementation.
National Investment Policy
⋯Framework governing foreign and domestic investment across priority sectors...
Data Protection Bill
⋯Establishes rights and obligations for personal data processing by public and private bodies...
Energy Development Strategy
⋯Long-term strategy for diversification of the national energy mix toward renewables...
They’re drowning in fragmented input. Comments arrive via email, PDFs, and WhatsApp. The rationale behind previous decisions disappears. They find themselves repeating the same drafting patterns with no way to reuse past work.
A structured drafting environment with inline comments and redlining, version control that preserves the why behind every change, and direct linkages to evidence, data, and precedent policies.
Every data subject has the right to access personal information held by a responsible party, subject to the limitations set out in this Act. A request for access must be responded to within 30 days of receipt by the responsible party.
Where a request is refused, the responsible party must provide written reasons and inform the data subject of the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator.
Should we align this with the GDPR 72-hour breach notification window for consistency with cross-border compliance?
They feel unheard. Consultations feel tokenistic. They submit detailed input and never find out whether it was read, let alone whether it influenced the final policy.
Simple, structured consultation interfaces with clear scope and deadlines — and feedback loops that show exactly how their input informed the final decision.
Clause 3.2: Investment thresholds need revision
D. Mensah · Mar 12, 2025
The current threshold of $500k for foreign direct investment classification is outdated. Regional benchmarks suggest $250k would better reflect current market conditions.
Section 5: Environmental safeguards missing
Civil Society Coalition · Mar 10, 2025
No mention of mandatory environmental impact assessments for investments in extractive industries. This is a significant gap.
Investment Promotion Centre
Mar 14, 2025
Strongly supports the liberalisation provisions in Section 4 as a necessary step for attracting regional capital.
Private Enterprise Federation
Mar 11, 2025
Endorses the policy direction with the recommendation that SME provisions be strengthened in the final draft.
Policies are disconnected from reality. Internal policies exist in documents that staff never read. SOPs don’t reflect how work gets done. There’s no mechanism to enforce acknowledgment or trigger reviews when regulations change.
Full policy lifecycle management, clear linkage between policies and the procedures that implement them, and mechanisms for enforcement, acknowledgment, and scheduled review.
They don’t write policy. They live with it. Policies are written for lawyers, not for them.
Practical guidance and decision aids, process maps linked directly to policy clauses, and channels to flag implementation issues upstream.
There’s no single source of truth.
Simple, searchable policy access. A clear “what applies to me” view filtered by role and department. Acknowledgement tracking.
Policies exist on paper but not in practice.
End-to-end traceability from policy to process to execution. Verifiable evidence of consultation, approval, and compliance.
3 of 5 requirements met
The platform maps to the full policy lifecycle — from the first draft to the final audit. Every stage is structured, traceable, and connected to the stage before and after it.
Each stage has its own set of tools, roles, and workflows. Drafting uses a structured editor with version control and inline commenting. Consultation uses structured submission forms with deadline tracking. Approval uses configurable sign-off chains with full audit logs. Implementation links policies to SOPs and process maps. Monitoring tracks acknowledgement and compliance. Audit generates end-to-end traceability reports.
3 of 5 requirements met
Maata was born out of the African policy-making experience — contexts where policy capacity is high but tooling is minimal, where institutions are building governance infrastructure from the ground up, and where the stakes of getting policy right are immediate and concrete.
But the problems Maata solves are not unique to Africa. Fragmented consultations, opaque approvals, and disconnected implementation are universal.
Maata doesn’t simplify policy-making. It structures it.
Public policy and institutional governance. Seven personae. One platform.
That’s Maata.